Resignation

comes when one realizes that something or someone has failed to meet one's expectations? Who has not felt the pang of regret, the painful sense that events might have been otherwise, that somehow something else ought to have been and yet will not be? To suffer a diminished faith in others is an experience of disappointment. In the very syllables of the word-on its very surface-the plain register of its meaning appears: disappointed, removed from appointment. The train of expectation is derailed; the appointment is not kept; the meeting is missed; the friend is unable to take a stand when it matters most. We mark our losses over

To raise the question concerning the possibility of operating in a world is to take seriously another notion that forms a background assumption for this professor, a notion widely shared but more rarely noticed, namely, that somehow we compose our selves through words, and that our words, in ways not always fully appreciated, compose worlds of meaning. If we even grudgingly grant this sort of power to the words of a resignation, we will immediately be drawn to note as well that the act of resignation is a discursive act that identifies or marks a place one is departing from. So, in reference to the words of this professor we might, at least, raise the question of place or, perhaps even more accurately, context. One of the definitions of context is "the weaving together of words and sentences."3 The sense of "weaving" connects this word to its use as a verb and points toward its use as a metaphor for the work of hand and mind together. The parts of a discourse are often characterized as being knitted together to form a coherent whole: If a part of a whole does not relate to the rest, it is said to be out of context. We act on the words we weave as though the discursive realms of existence they disclose to us constitute a reality on the basis of which we might begin to act in the world.4 In so doing, we turn this noun, context, into a verb, to context. "I resign." What does this sentence mean? What is the context of the act of resignation? How does the act of resignation context a world?
The professor's letter is one enactment of resignation. It might be useful to see how that resignation compares to another. Below is a very famous letter of resignation. This letter is dated 9 August 1974; written on White House stationary; and addressed to Henry Kissinger, the secretary of state, a high public official (though once a professor himself). sans title or printed name. If one eliminates the modifiers ("hereby" and "the Office of President of the United States"), modifiers that in cruel retrospect might be seen to have served as self-lacerating and selfaggrandizing reminders of a sovereignty lost-in large part because of his dangerous inability to comprehend presidential sovereignty in democratic terms-the body of Mr. Nixon's letter is identical with that of the rejected university professor. But even while it is like the professor's letter in its minimalism and its lack of concession, somehow it seems to have nonetheless conceded much more, by virtue of the importance of the resignation and the highly publicized character of the letter's release to a citizenry. The public character of the letter is signified here not by the body of the letter but by the address of both the author and the recipient of the letter. The common language of the two letters reflects the substantive commonality of the two resignations. We might note that both resignations are actions undertaken by their authors in the hope that they might contribute to bringing a traumatic experience to a conclusion. Both are attempts to mark the site of a trauma, to contain it, and to remove its effects. The measure of the success or failure of each letter, moreover, lies not in the quality of the letter itself but in the extent to which it can be said that the letter has been received by all concerned parties. These include the persons or institution addressed and the author of the resignation, understood here as the signer of the letter. (While one might argue that the determination of the author of a resignation cannot be confined to the person who signs the letter but must extend to the agents who may have forced such a step, the resignation itself should be thought of as a distinct act that is not to be confused with the forces that bring about its occasion. Moreover, maintaining a clear distinction between those who are responsible for forcing a resignation and the decision of the resigner to resign is often the goal, not only of those who force the resignation, but of the resigner as well. This distinction is very important to the resigner because if others fail to distinguish the forces that cause the departure from the action of the person who resigns, they fail to acknowledge the agency of the resigner and hence implicitly denigrate his or her authority, provoking yet further attacks on her or his dignity, most often by expressions of pity.) The receipt of the letter is crucial to the resignation because it is the moment of communication, the act of transmission of the sign of resignation.
For both professor and president the letter of resignation is a collaborative act undertaken by the resigner and those who are charged with the duty of accepting it. (For contrast, we might briefly note the phenomenon of the resignation that is refused. Sometimes a breach is healed, a potential traumatic breakdown of relationships averted, by the refusal to accept the resignation. It is a small joke of history that Nixon addressed his letter of resignation to Kissinger, who had often used the threat of resignation as an instrument of political infighting during his years as Nixon's national security advisor.)6 More generally, it seems as though it takes at least two parties to enact a resignation. In this sense, resignation might be seen as a social action of a special sort-the adaptation of an ancient act to modern conditions of traumatic disruption and dismemberment that can be comprehended as a kind of rupture with or disruption of the status quo, undertaken as a necessity in the face of an unacceptable present condition.
Is there a common act we might label as "the" resignation that would apply to both of these letters? I have chosen Nixon's letter of resignation as an example because it is so widely and obviously known as a public act. But is his resignation any more public than that of the professor, other than in regard to the size of the public that was touched by it? Here acts of resignation bear upon the constitution of boundaries that distinguish the spaces we designate as public and private. If we were to say that the professor's letter is private and Nixon's public, then we would have to claim that the professor's resignation might have an effect on her, her family, and colleagues in the field and even beyond, but that the impact will be recorded and contained as a private trauma. Nixon's resignation, moreover, while it could be said to have redounded to posterity, having an impact on all who are citizens of the United States and many who live beyond the borders of the United States, would also have been recorded and contained as a public trauma, having no private effect on him or his family or the private lives of those who were touched by it. This claim is implausible, even though we can reasonably intuit that we might make a major distinction concerning the relative impact and importance of the two resignations. What might be called the consequential power of the two acts varies greatly as a result of the contexts in which they have occurred, which is not only a question of the relative sizes but of the relevant functions of the publics drawn together, which might vary so greatly as to render the meanings of them incommensurable. But can we go further? Can we say that this incommensurable character of the resignations is secured as long as there is clarity about the distinction between public and private, as long as there is no spillover from one realm into the other, and as long as it remains possible to claim that the role of public citizen is autonomous and separate from the role of private subject?
That is never so. Resignations show that the simple, obvious, and politically valuable distinction between public and private is instead complex, subtle, impure, and politically problematic. In fact, it seems as though the relationships between public and private resignations are connected in such ways as to render the meaning of the distinction between public and private most problematic at the very moments we try to bring the distinction to bear on these two acts. Resignation is a case in point. The harm or healing the resigner feels upon resigning is an element of the "public" impact of the act. The extent to which the gathered public is sensitive to this feeling informs how resignations are received. In this sense, resignation might be understood as an act that gives shape to an important onto-political category, that is, as an act that connects different aspects of human existence to each other, that constitutes public and private spaces through the institutions it helps to shape and break down and through the moods it encourages and elicits. Resignation might be understood as an act of traversal, crossing the boundaries between the particular public and private spaces it helps to constitute and amendindeed, constituting them through traversal. In fact, resignation demands that we think about it as a political act that shapes the boundaries of public and private spaces.
In this sense, resignation is close to founding. In an essay on the founding of republics, Bonnie Honig explains the role that performative utterances play in founding political actions.' Focusing on the American Declaration of Independence, Honig highlights two powerful interpretations of the famous phrase from the preamble, "We hold these truths to be self-evident," one by Hannah Arendt and the other by Jacques Derrida. Reading them with and against each other, she notes that both Arendt and Derrida recognize that there is a paradox to be found in performative utterances. Both suggest that performatives need to be anchored in promises, and both express concern about the paradox that is the entailment of this need to anchor performatives. Arendt worries about how the need to anchor might tempt one to embrace natural law as a foundational anchor. This move would deprive political action of its distinctive character, destroy its autonomy. Paralleling Arendt's concern with natural law, Derrida suggests that one might be tempted to seek to anchor action in an unproblematized subject who is able to speak in the name of something or someone. (This simple subject causes a lot of trouble in modern polities, for instance, because the principle of sovereignty will increasingly be projected onto a power imagined to be secure, but which, paradoxically, cannot be made secure, and which instead must become entangled in a sovereign search for freedom as security.) But the autonomy of political action does not concern Derrida in the same way it does Arendt, who sees performance as expressing the contingency of political action that she cherishes, and who feels that by anchoring an ac- tion, one hampers its purity. Instead, Derrida understands the fabulous deferment entailed in promising as a structural feature of language itself. Politically, the anxieties that attend the thoughts accompanying such actions generate an extraordinary energy as founders seek to anchor their actions in sites that they hope, by dint of position, will enable them to escape or overcome this paradox of performance. In this sense, a promise can open a world of possibility when what is promised is world changing.
The paradox of performatives is visible in founding acts, but it insinuates itself into actions of resignation as well. Resignation mirrors founding. A resignation is a quitting for reasons that must be enunciated in the act of quitting itself. This is not to say that when one resigns one lists one's reasons, though this is often the case. More important, the very act of resignation speaks its reason gesturally. It is by definition a giving up of something-one's life, one's being, one's soul.8 It is a re-signing of the initial promise that marks its breaking, a breaking of a seal. It is the breaking of a promise, either by the person resigning or the institution that has forced the resignation. Like the Declaration of Independence, which required the signature of those committing their honor to it, even as it enabled the creation of a community of honor, fabulously allowing the signing,9 the resignation letter similarly requires a signature to mark the breaking of the seal or sign of the honorable commitment. The act of resignation signals an intervention, an impossible departure from the institutional entanglements one once accepted as the grounding of a series of relationships. The resignation inverts the fabulous character of the founding act; it is a parting that attempts to achieve its end by an assertion which repeats that of founding, namely, that all that has gone before is to be of no account for the future.
A resignation can be understood as the withdrawal of consent by someone who once entered into a compact with others, someone who had made a mutual agreement with others to be ruled in common. The act of resignation implies the fact that the consent that had been given was not tacit but explicit; the explicit character of the resignation matches the drama of consent to be found in founding actions.1' People find their own voices in acts of resignation as a matter of learning to speak for themselves, against the idea that others can continue to speak for them, or 8. See Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "resignation." 9. "In signing, the people say-and do what they say they do, but in differing or deffering themselves through [diffirant par] the intervention of their representatives whose representativity is fully legitimated only by the signature, thus after the fact or the coup [apris coup]-henceforth, I have the right to sign, in truth I will already have had it since I was able to give it to myself" (Jacques The character of a resignation, then, is potently public, a symbolic gathering together of those who had mutually promised by way of a formal address, in order to mark the breaking of the promise. And, yet, because this public is being called together at the moment of its dissolution, the act of resignation is simultaneously potently private, dispersing the community of the contract that had been assumed to exist when the contract was being honored. When it is the abdication of an office, a resignation is a return to the most private from the most public, another way of escaping the dictation of the demand of a promise. A test of honor is invoked when particular acts of resignation are contemplated. The resignation might be thought of as an experimental moment, a testing of the limits of the community that was called into being by the contract. Such a testing, occasioned by an uncertainty as to the status of the community established by the contract, is accompanied by an extraordinary collective anxiety. It is not only the person who resigns who is tested. All the members of the community who are implicated in the promise must respond to the resignation. The form the response takes is usually less important than the posture that is taken regarding the fact of resignation and the context in which the resignation occurs.
Perhaps appropriately, the most prominent response to the act of resignation usually is that of the resigner. Nixon's response to his resignation was to show to the gathered public his anxiety during the period immediately prior to his resignation. His was an anxiety that was itself extraordinarily intense, as befitted the unprecedented character of presidential resignation in the particular context of the Constitution of the United States. For him, it seemed as though the end of his administration was also the end of constitutional government. He prevaricated, delayed, wept, prayed with Secretary of State Kissinger, invoked the memory of his dead Quaker mother, threatened executive violence, got drunk, wished he were dead, and spoke to portraits of dead predecessors, conjuring them up as ghosts who haunted the 1974 present of the White House. And those dead presidents might even best be understood as specters of sovereignty, called up by the trauma of yet another time out of joint.12 Aside from the response of Nixon himself, there were many other public and personal responses to his resignation. Among those who had always despised him, some were clearly delighted; others, while relieved that he had resigned, were shaken and distressed, even mournful. Among his supporters, some were defiant and bitter; others were relieved that he 11. This idea parallels Cavell's claim concerning entering a political community; see ibid., p. 27.
12. This reference is only a gesture, scratching the surface of the complex analysis of specters that Derrida has undertaken; see Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York, 1994). had resigned, shaken and distressed, and mournful. It was from those who displayed the most complex sense of mournfulness, from those who appropriately postured as witnesses to a trauma, that the most enduring responses to the Nixon resignation eventually emerged.'3 Nixon acted out upon a national stage a trauma less visibly performed in resignations such as that of the professor. Beyond the opportunities for hyperbolic gesture, the common and understandable temptation toward grand gesture in the comedic tradition-"You can't fire me! I quit!"-resignation is an intensely self-reflective gesture, carried out with a sense that the resignation may memorialize the broken promise, but that a promise broken always lasts longer than a promise kept. But the fronting of the resignation, the swirling temporal connections between public and private that constitute the nexus of its traversals, evokes a very complicated set of moods for those who engage in it and are engaged by it. The mourning of resigning is a grieving that is embarrassing-not only because a resignation inscribes the failure of the promise and the possibility that the person who resigns is somehow deficient in an element of her or his self but because the resignation contains an illicit pleasure for the person who resigns that is akin to attending one's own funeral. In committing an act of resignation one is able, not unlike Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, to be present at the death of an aspect of one's self. To many who watched the final days of the Nixon administration unfold, especially to those who watched on television as he said good-bye to the White House staff, he seemed somehow strangely excited and perversely energized by this misery, in his final performance as president pulling back from a total breakdown to assess his self-destruction.'4 Nixon's melodramatic performance might have been the most appropriate existential behavior, given the kind of stupor that is provoked by the act of resignation. This stupor appears as the clumsy and witlessly affective response to the first act in the larger action of resignation, the moment of decision, which is relived and intensified in the second act 13. This seems to be the point of Jean Bethke Elshtain's reflection on Nixon at the time of his death. Elshtain confesses having been a "Nixon loather" and looks back abashed that she was able to hate so easily, writing, "I do not hate anymore. I have joined the ranks of the nervous" (Jean Bethke Elshtain, Democracy on Trial [New York, 1995], p. xvii). This latter-day conversion from hatred was made possible by members of Congress in the early 1970s who both investigated Nixon with the sense of carefulness the contract of government required and envisioned the trauma the contract's breaking would impose on the polity. Anticipating the trauma to be caused by a broken promise might signify a passage to a certain kind of maturity. Reflecting back on one's bad behavior in a distant past in order to self-endorse one's contemporary piety is a different project, I think.
14. See Woodward and Bernstein, The Final Days, pp. 455-56. This pattern of coming close to public breakdown and pulling back was observed prior to the Watergate scandal by Garry Wills, who noted that Nixon followed a similar script in the Checkers speech of 1952 and in his press conference following the defeat by Edmund Brown in the 1962 California gubernatorial election; see Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (Boston, 1970). Resignation of resignation, the moment of departure. What seems to be consistently surprising for those who resign is the complexity and extent of the entanglements they must sever upon this second act of resignation. This severing is powerfully mundane, immediately concerned with the minutiae of work life-the building where one works, the drive to the job, the paperwork one learns to master and subvert, the social rituals that develop among the people one works beside, the cautionary lessons concerning those in power who could help or hinder one's work and conditions of employment, the machinery, the sounds and quiet, the smells, the color of the paint on the walls. Through the background details of quotidian life we can comprehend a resignation as the signing away of one's access to a familiar place where, whether one has succeeded or failed, one has nonetheless lived.
The fatalism that is attached to the term-to be resigned is to accept the fate that has been meted out to one, to concede the signing over of one's soul-is a consequence of the trauma of this impossible severing of entanglements. Because a resignation is a quitting, it is a commitment to the fate of the trauma of severance and an admission of the open and hazardous field of action that enables the resigner to assess her or his new place in or out of the context of that field. As a founding is like a birth, a resignation is like a death, a giving up on life that is akin to a giving up of life. This claim may seem exaggerated, but a primary use of the word resign concerns giving up, not simply one's position, but one's life. To illustrate this meaning, the Oxford English Dictionary cites Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, which I will quote more fully here: What should I don this robe and trouble you? Be chosen with proclamations to-day, To-morrow yield up rule, resign my life, And set abroad new business for you all?'5 In these lines, Titus Andronicus attempts to decline the offer of election to the Roman senate, a position from which he would be able to help choose the next emperor (and perhaps, it is hinted, attain the emperor's seat himself, though in this bloody play, that is not to be). Importantly, to have accepted the office would have been to have resigned his life. Titus says, "Give me a staff of honor for mine age, / But not a sceptre to control the world."'6 In the United States of America in the late twentieth century such a refusal is a rhetorical tool of the politician, a device for deceiving others into giving what is covertly desired. We might compare Titus Andronicus to the duke of Gloucester, a.k.a. Richard III, as he reluctantly 15. William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston, 1974), 1.1.189-92 If he is to be believed. Belief in conscience, belief in some sort of ensoulment, is a key here, not only for monarchs but for any sovereign authorities, and not only for sovereign authorities of government but for any individual who is capable of resignation. We might even claim that anyone who is an individual is so by virtue of the fact that he or she has the capacity to resign. The terms of the soul's gains and losses, its convertibility, are essential for figuring this sovereign power in ways that are sometimes unexpected.'8 Because official public life in the United States has historically more often than not contained material advantages gained from office as its most obvious reward, it presents a temptation, less to murder-though many American politicians, especially presidents, have not hesitated at that thresholdthan to venality, for those who would accept power.'9 Hence, appeals to the myth of Cincinnatus have served as a politician's rhetorical strategy from at least the days of George Washington. This American adaptation of Roman historical myth points to yet another shape resignation might take. The rough judgment of the character of politicians that citizens of a representative democracy are compelled to make very often and most appropriately focuses on the sincerity of their resignation to office. To be resigned to office is to acknowledge the traumatic force of the departure from the life one otherwise might have been allowed to live, to constitute the realm of political action as separate from the pleasures of quotidian life. In a democracy, that other life remains a latent possibility-a place to return to, if only in the collective imagination of a relevant public. The 1996 American presidential campaign discussions concerning Bob Dole's deep roots in Russell, Kansas, and Bill Clinton's in Hope, Arkansas, are consistent with a deep tradition in American politics. They reflect an insistence that an authentic person must stand before the gathered citizenry, a person who has given up a life of private pleasure to hold public office. Public officials are supposed to defer the enjoyment of the fruits of private labors. They are supposed to do so out of a sense of sacrifice, not for the pleasures that may be gained from holding power, and the deepest suspicion we collectively hold against politicians is that they enjoy the pleasures of their offices. The consent of the governed, in all its ambivalence, is matched here by the consent of the governors. This shared sensibility, what in Emersonian parlance might be termed the mood of politics, is often read as cynicism or, at best, stoicism.21 But it is also a response, perhaps the most appropriate response, to the demands of consent.
Is it reasonable to think that the resignation to office is a breaking of a contract? Here the comparison of taking office with the resignation from a position seems to become tendentious. But the supposed incommensurability of the two experiences appears only if we are able to assume that there is no promise comparable to the contract, tacit or explicit, governing private life. Such an assumption would seem to place the constitution of common life exclusively on the side of the public making and breaking of promises. Alternatively, we might take more serious notice of the fact that there is rarely a single point of promise in what we call private life, but rather a network of promises, tacit and explicit, that establishes a context for the constitution and amendment of an imperfectly private life. Then we might be able to say that promises are made and broken every day, in situations that it would be difficult to claim are exclusively public or private in the common sense of the terms. And then we might also ask, How do these promises and the breaking of them inflect resignations?
We seem to have left the professor to her thoughts at this point. But this is not so. The ability to sign the resignation places her in the same context as Nixon, assuredly with a smaller domain of consequence than he, but in possession of an errant sovereignty no less fragile and no less intact, to the extent that both enjoy something that might even be called 21. For a fascinating reading of contemporary expressions of cynicism and stoicism in American culture, see Bill Chaloupka, "Praising Minnesota: The Coens' 'Fargo' and the Pressures of Stoic Community," Theory and Event 1, no. 2 (1997), http://muse.jhu.edu/ journals/theory_&_event/v001/1.2chaloupka.html sovereignty.22 Her departure from a university entails a publicly noted movement away from a context of action for her, a place of work. She too had resigned to her life as a professor in committing herself to the vocation of thinking, to a commitment to teach students. That she may have acted with more dignity than Nixon in the face of her trauma is not really the point (though we are able to know more of Nixon's dignity and its lack because of the glare of publicity that contributes to the presidential aura). The point instead is that the various commitments to office, as modest or grandiose as they might seem, as unnoticed or famous as they might be, might be known as a common lot in the lives of democratic subjects.
These two resignations suggest lines of departure for a study of the politics of resignation. One can resign to the public or to the private and in both cases experience significant loss (while sometimes marking surprising gains).

Confirming Desperation, Fronting Resignation
A resignation can be like a peaceful death, as it often is when it is a voluntary retirement, or when committed to improve one's situation with the goodwill and understanding of those one is leaving behind. But when a resignation is forced, it is a traumatic killing. Whether the killing is homicide or suicide is often hard to tell and depends upon who broke the promise; what the promise was; and how, when, where, and why it 22. "The President has paid dear for his White House. It has commonly cost him all his peace, and the best of his manly attributes. To preserve for a short time so conspicuous an appearance before the world, he is content to eat dust before the real masters who stand erect behind the throne" (Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Compensation," Essays and Lectures [New York, 1983], p. 288). was broken. The intense and powerful cycles of gossip and innuendo that attend a controversial resignation are a result of a combination of mordancy and prudential interest. In a forced resignation the evidence of the murderous intent of those who achieved its signing afterward follows all parties involved, its effects fading away only gradually. That the person who resigns so often lingers on in body (except when there is a suicide or a murderous rampage, as rarely, but notoriously, occurs), that he or she may recover somewhere else in the same field of endeavor and reappear in relevant public venues sometimes creates a new embarrassment for all involved. The person who has resigned does not want to be seen, and those who have forced the person to resign do not want to see her or him. The reaction of those who have forced the resignation is only in part and only occasionally a guilty response by those who have power and have misused it. It is usually an attempt to redistribute responsibility more generally, a denial of power by those who in the end don't want to exercise it but are required to do so, and who do so primarily for the institutional rewards that accompany the exercise of authority rather than because of an intrinsic desire to exercise power over others. Stock phrases-"His work had been falling off lately"; "She was very good, but this is a very difficult position to hold"; "Yes, we had recommended him highly in our last progress report, but we were only trying to encourage him to improve by praising him"-do a certain work for those who remain in charge, rationalizing the resignation as a process in which they can convince themselves of being irrelevant participants, focusing attention on the person who has resigned and smoothing over the traumatic gaps left in the institution as a consequence of the departure by reaching their own sense of closure.

This certain difficulty associated with being lost and found is marked by Cavell in many of his meditations that connect themselves explicitly to Emerson's essay "Experience." Cavell also usefully thematizes the problem as philosophical and melodramatic in his think
Almost all resignations, forced or otherwise, are inflected with a certain passivity; indeed, this sense inheres in the meaning of the word. To be resigned is to accept one's fate. Both those who resign and those who accept a resignation can be led to feel as though events are beyond their control. The act of accepting implies such a passivity on the part of those who receive the resignation, as do all of the psychological strategies employed to distance the official function of acceptance from the agency of the person or people who accept the resignation. From the point of view of the one who resigns, the act of resignation casts one into an ambiguous relationship with one's life. Because the person who resigns finds that he or she cannot be certain of an important range of relationships in which he or she has been enmeshed, because an important context for acting has been ripped apart, other ostensible certainties of life are called into question, so that following a resignation one often becomes cautious in reference to, and withdrawn from, all sorts of dimensions of existence.
Even in the absence of a direct request or demand that one resigneven when one is being encouraged to stay-one usually resigns because one has come to feel that there is no other choice: either the alternative has become so attractive that one feels compelled to leave, or the conditions of one's situation are so unbearable that one feels forced to leave. More often than not the intensification of one condition has an impact on the attractiveness of the alternative, so that a new place becomes more attractive to the extent that the old place becomes unattractive. This dynamic contributes to another kind of passivity that enables those who are breaking a promise to feel as though it isn't their hands that are doing the breaking. The person who is leaving and hence abandoning those who are left behind is in another perilous situation, in which the bad faith of a broken promise propels him or her out the door. This situation can lead to a different friction, other quarrels, commonly called burning your bridges behind you. Then the resigner tries to overcome her or his own passivity in an act that reiterates the resignation, deepens it. Or the resigner tries to cushion the departure so that he or she may pretend not to have departed but only to have taken leave, gradually withdrawing effort, slowly ceasing to matter in one context as he or she finds himself or herself more deeply enmeshed in another.
Even under these milder conditions, however, resignations are evidence of the fact that there are no clean slates in life. A resignation, which can itself be thought of as an attempt to clean the slate, is never complete and never painless, only more or less so. A happy resigner might ask, "Does the resignation always have to involve the breaking of a promise?"24 The simple answer is yes. For no matter how gently it is accomplished, no matter how understandable the reasoning that informs it, and no matter how indifferent those who are left behind might be to the departure of the resigner, a resignation marks the fact that a common future, premised on a shared assumption that a set of conditions will persist, is removed by willful action of someone, even as that someone believes the act to be beyond her or his control or will. And what of those who would engage in an act of resignation except for the fact that they cannot? There are many people-perhaps a piece of the soul of almost every personwhose various commitments to family, to duty, to those who would in various ways suffer from their departure should they do what they want to do, which is to break the promise they made and quit, impel them to persist in bad positions, with bad bosses and debilitating work, unhappily bearing on. Instead of resigning, they are resigned to not being able to resign. They endure what is otherwise unendurable; they carry on; they resist the trauma of separation by suffering the institutional entanglements that impinge on them. The harassed secretary, the abused line worker, the pressured salesman, the already-tenured professor who faces a frozen job market and hostile colleagues, the parents who stay together for the sake of the children: are they involved in acts of resignation as well? Here we might distinguish between the movement from one silence Resignation to another that characterizes the condition of those who are already resigned, and the speech of those who commit acts of resignation. The silence of those who are resigned seems to operate as a confirmation of despair, whereas the statement of those who resign is a willful action. Why do both seem to lead to a similar place? Does a resignation occur in the absence of a statement of it? Is it possible to resign without making a statement? If not, is the condition of being resigned an accurate assessment of the condition of those who are confirmed in their despair? These unsigned resignations may yet have something more to tell us about the condition of commitments to ourselves and to each other.25 Cavell suggests that the condition of the withdrawal of consent is silence, and that the withdrawal of silence does not put oneself out of community but renders one without anything to say. "The alternative to speaking for yourself politically is not: speaking for yourself privately... The alternative is having nothing (political) to say."26 He deepens this argument: We do not know in advance what the content of our mutual acceptance is, how far we may be in agreement. I do not know in advance how deep my agreement with myself is, how far responsibility for the language may run. But if I am to have my own voice in it, I must be speaking for others and allow others to speak for me.... The alternative is having nothing to say, being voiceless, not even mute.27 Voicelessness might be understood as the condition of those who are resigned to not resigning, who have failed to sign their resignations. This failure to sign, this voicelessness, leads us to a place that is somewhere else.
When Henry David Thoreau in Walden famously writes, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," his reference is to mass, to men, and to acquiescence, as much as it is to despair.28 The set of references he raises at this key juncture in Walden shows how his economy of existence might point toward ways of confronting the desperation that attends life when life tends toward a specific kind of meaninglessness, a meaninglessness that is most directly associated in his writings with the gathering of luxurious goods. The realm of luxury is vast and contributes much to the venality of presidents and other politicians, but also to the despair of those who would be forced to choose them. And this despair is not even the most important shape this quiet desperation takes. What does it mat-25. The phrase "unsigned resignation" was suggested to me by Lisa Disch. 26. Cavell, The Claim of Reason, pp. 27-28. 27. Ibid., p. 28. 28. Cavell suggests that quiet desperation is Thoreau's term for the everyday condition of living our skepticism, the tragedy of everyday life; see Cavell, "The Philosopher in American Life," p. 9. ter that politicians are hopelessly corrupt, if that corruption is but the public expression of the desperation of those enslaved by the pursuit of unnecessary goods? Thoreau follows his sentence immediately with this one: "What is called resignation is confirmed desperation."29 Confirmed desperation is a desperation that has been tested and found as a closing experience of life. To be confirmed in despair is to have closed oneself upon oneself. A self so enclosed substitutes consumption for experience, and is less than fully alive. Such a self may exercise the right to remain silent in order to cover the shame of despair. But before whom will this self be ashamed? Thoreau, in his reckoning of every thing he consumes, wants to write in front of this silence, to experiment with another way of being that emerges from the wreckage of confirmed desperation. In this silence and of it, out of loss, he marks a gain. Those who would front the silence of despair are those who would dignify the demos. In doing so, Thoreau presents us with yet another way of understanding resignation, another way of moving toward a politics of the ordinary.
To evade a certain kind of desperation is Thoreau's task, or what might be called his experiment in waiting. The experience of Walden is a response to and test of the quiet desperation of the mass of men. Cavell, among others (though perhaps most insistently), has noted the importance of the constant intensity of Thoreau's response. "The experiment is the present-to make himself present to each circumstance, at every eventuality; since he is writing, in each significant mark."30 To write words in the woods is to turn every leaf to see its connection to every other, to context the moment of fronting nature to a society of presence. Marking the present suggests another way of leading life-being present in one's life, not despairing but professing a faith in the possibility of each moment being, against the meaninglessness of luxurious possession, meaningful. Thoreau writes, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation unless it was quite necessary" (W p. 66). Thoreau here suggests that his experiment in simple living is designed to uncover a certain truth about the world, a sublimity or meanness, access to either or both being available through the right kinds of experience. And while one might think that a discovery of the meanness of the world would leave one resigned, in the sense of being confirmed in one's despair, I believe that Thoreau wants to wager something else, that the practice of resignation out of necessity is not the same as its prac-29. Henry David Thoreau, "Walden, or, Life in the Woods" and "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" (New York, 1960), p. 10; hereafter abbreviated W 30. Cavell, The Senses of Walden, rev. ed. (San Francisco, 1981), p. 61. Resignation tice out of a sense of confirmation. This second path of resignation turns one back from the depth of a silence and stillness that is as far from the terms of consent as one can imaginably get, yet not ever beyond the point of no return, turns one back toward the engagement with a life to which one has permitted oneself to be necessarily resigned. The difference lies in how experience may be comprehended and practiced. A sense of resignation as confirmed desperation weighs heavily upon contemporary denizens of modern institutions. The weight does not derive from the fact that we are more fatefully encumbered by our institutional commitments than was Thoreau (although surely we must sometimes feel as though we are). Our present is one that he would no doubt respect as much as his own. But Thoreau might also insist that we are every bit as available for experimental living as was he, and he could no doubt take ironical pleasure in the notion that some of us impersonate him in his commitments and eccentricities. These impersonations risk ridicule if undertaken with anything less than a commitment to the cultivation of a democratic sensibility. But in taking his measure as our own, we might also acknowledge that the registers by which we try to calculate the successes and failures of our experiments have both become more explicit and exacting, on the one hand, and necessarily more vague and mysterious, on the other, and in so doing have driven us in our commitments further into the fugitive corners of life.
Alternatively, resignation practiced as a momentary suspension of faith, as a silent pause when language, while it does not exactly fail, falters, can (must) be a part of the experience of fronting the essential facts of life. Thoreau's necessary resignation, almost happily embraced, is most deeply his resignation to language. Language bears us and our worlds, builds and breaks us, inevitably re-signs us to the exigencies of life in every moment that we remember that we speak in words, sentences, and portions. This realization is a formidable burden happily borne by those who wait.31 It is yet another feeling of resignation that gives us a sense of return, a turning back to that which we may try to repudiate in our traumatic dislocation. Turning is expedited by the very fact of language, its most intimate constitution as a series of signs. The signing and re-signing of objects through language thus becomes comprehensible as a political contest.32 As Judith Butler writes, "Through a figure that marks the sus-31. I borrow here from Cavell, The Senses of Walden, which is divided into three main chapters, "Words," "Sentences," and "Portions." The insight that Walden is importantly a book about language itself is a theme most thoroughly explored by Cavell. 32. In a discussion of Hegel's master and bondsman, Judith Butler notes how the marking and remarking of the object, its signing and re-signing by bondsman and masterwhich culminates for Hegel in an achievement of self-recognition through the experience of absolute fear-is a scene of contestation; see Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, Calif., 1997), esp. pp. 34-39. This moment might be considered an example of what Butler earlier notes as the form that power takes as a kind of turning: "The turn appears to function as a tropological inauguration of the subject, a founding pension of our ontological commitments, we seek to account for how the subject comes to be. That this figure is itself a 'turn' is, rhetorically, performatively spectacular; 'turn' translates the Greek sense of'trope."'33 We turn, and re-turn, we sign, and re-sign, and the better part of each of us struggles to become worthy of the democracy we cultivate with and in each other.

Waiting (The Exile of Words)
Every day people resign. But every day we have available to us alternative experiences of resignation, cutting close to the desperation that shapes life. Here, for instance, is an offering from a poet who sees in the act of waiting a way to be-calm oneself, to refuse the act of being who one ought to be, in the unbidden hope of something otherwise.
What does it mean, now, to waste time or to waste space? What is the difference between the crowd and the implied non-utility of these invaluable abstractions, or between the crowd (when is a crowd a public?) and waste itself, the excess that is more than, but not useful, not operative, that falls away from pragmatic necessities? Mother says, "Stop wasting time!" For those of us who know the deliriums of procrastination, who live in a relentless morass of wait that refuses to realize itself in direct action, so that the actions themselves gang up and gather into a mound or heap of pending, a depending, this question has a strange ring to it, like a summons which is also an alarm, an invitation to exile.34 Ann Lauterbach's incantation to wait shows waiting as an active opposition to action; an opportunity seized; a way to make the insistent ring of utility strange, to allow for the time and space to converse in the face of the arbitrary ends that hang like deadlines over our lives in common. Like Thoreau, Lauterbach perdures with the confidence of the democratic poet. What she calls the dread of exile that accompanies those who wait might be noted as arising from a state of emergency produced by the fateful intensification of the quiet desperation Thoreau opposed. It arises as a philosophical problem in the work of Wittgenstein, but Wittgenstein could stand in for all who are concerned about freedom in an age marked by the loss of its space. Here a remark by Cavell resonates as both an observation and prophecy: "The threat or fact of exile in Wittgenstein's philosophizing--I mean of course the exile of words-is not moment whose ontological status remains permanently uncertain" (pp. 3-4). Resignation might be considered as another example of this turning. 33. Ibid., p. 4. 34. Lauterbach, "The Night Sky, IV," American Poetry Review 26 (Aug. 1997): 22. Resignation limited."35 We do not know our way about. But in this waiting, in the exile of words, we might think that we find ourselves by founding, by working our words, weaving our texts, and noting the power of our necessary resignation to language. We do not know our way about. Yet how busy we are! How incapacitated by the need to move, as yet discerning that in stillness lies a danger greater than flight. Those who have counseled stillness may already have been moved to the margins of contemporary life by the reasoning that tells us all to submit to the powers of our age. Even in this sense, being still is an activity, a resistance to a movement that obliterates the ability to think about the conditions of ordinariness. To wait is to express an unbidden faith that the desideration of being can be fulfilled in the fullness of time, that the desiccated forms of life will be rained upon and rebloom. Looking for signs of another commonality that might emerge in another nature, wasting time in this world, we might be devoted to the task of finding in the ordinary a renewable resource for a democracy of those who, unbidden, are willing to wait. This willing is a powerful one. It is a kind of standing, a positive acknowledgement and enactment of the prayer that where one stands is where one is. Protestant in character, waiting is the risk we must take in order to fight off and embrace the confirmation of our common despair.
Waiting is a kind of silence. Out of silence we return to lead new lives, to come over to the condition of thinking and acting that might mark us as the bearers of something better than what we were before. The commitment of the democratic critic is to the cultivation of tropes, to the poetic sensibility that is the only way to be resigned to the truth of our lives together and apart, without being confirmed in despair.
Thoreau's ontological commitments led him to Walden Pond, encouraged him to plant a field, not for beans to eat, but "for the sake of tropes and expression, to serve as a parable-maker one day" (W, p. 112). His tropes, in turn, may be ours. We might better know our uncertainty as a proof of our commitments, our assertions and dissents, agreements and affirmations, amendments and initiatives-in short, our conversations with each other-as alive to the possibility of being fully awake. Our necessary resignations can then be made without too great a sense of regret, as long as we have undertaken to speak carefully, listen fully, and represent our selves honestly. This moment of resignation might be called a romance of a politics of the ordinary. It is a romance as simple as breathing. Inhale, "exile, spirit in."